The Sam Snow story sounds like something concocted to introduce doubt, rather than something with basis in reality. Some anonymous scapegoat who steps up and claimed he did everything that was illegal, not Keys.

This is a journalist who became the story, not because he was protecting a source.

He should never be taken seriously again, unless he asks the question, “Do you want fries with that?”

Even if he did do it, I think the American obsession with punishing people for their whole lives is really bad for society. Undoubtedly you've done some illegal things. Should you be reduced to fast food worker? I don't think so.

This is a journalist who became the story, not because he was protecting a source.

He should never be taken seriously again, unless he asks the question, “Do you want fries with that?”

Even if he did do it, I think the American obsession with punishing people for their whole lives is really bad for society. Undoubtedly you've done some illegal things. Should you be reduced to fast food worker? I don't think so.

Why do you think their prisons are so full? Because minimum wage isn't enough to live off. Social security is non existent and if you were ever convicted, that's about the best you can hope for, vindictive SoBs. But hey 'tough on crime' still gets politicians elected so I'll just sit back and laugh at their third world incarceration rates.

It's a trouble with that particular law. It's very broad and mostly meant to punish people who use computers to steal large amounts or from large numbers of people. Tech-support scammers, for instance, or hackers who steal your credentials some other way and then clean out your bank accounts or charge thousands of dollars of stuff on your credit cards. To make it broadly scoped enough to catch the stuff they wanted to catch, they also left it open to being used for really minor stuff like what was done here.

This is a journalist who became the story, not because he was protecting a source.

He should never be taken seriously again, unless he asks the question, “Do you want fries with that?”

Even if he did do it, I think the American obsession with punishing people for their whole lives is really bad for society. Undoubtedly you've done some illegal things. Should you be reduced to fast food worker? I don't think so.

Why do you think their prisons are so full? Because minimum wage isn't enough to live off. Social security is non existent and if you were ever convicted, that's about the best you can hope for, vindictive SoBs. But hey 'tough on crime' still gets politicians elected so I'll just sit back and laugh at their third world incarceration rates.

It's not only because of minimum wages, there is a whole slew reasons prisons are full, most notably is they are for profit, the longer a person is incarcerated the more money he makes for the company.

It's a trouble with that particular law. It's very broad and mostly meant to punish people who use computers to steal large amounts or from large numbers of people. Tech-support scammers, for instance, or hackers who steal your credentials some other way and then clean out your bank accounts or charge thousands of dollars of stuff on your credit cards. To make it broadly scoped enough to catch the stuff they wanted to catch, they also left it open to being used for really minor stuff like what was done here.

Best law is a law that makes everyone a criminal. Because then when you need to score political points or just get annoyed by someone it is easy to lawfully get rid of them. After all the indoctrination is that law is equal to ethics (while in reality they have very little in common).

It's a trouble with that particular law. It's very broad and mostly meant to punish people who use computers to steal large amounts or from large numbers of people. Tech-support scammers, for instance, or hackers who steal your credentials some other way and then clean out your bank accounts or charge thousands of dollars of stuff on your credit cards. To make it broadly scoped enough to catch the stuff they wanted to catch, they also left it open to being used for really minor stuff like what was done here.

Those are actually quite small time crimes compared to what was believed to be the problem in 1986 when the law was written. Computers were still rare enough (and nothing on the consumer level was connected) outside of business that the fear was someone would gain access to a core mainframe of a place like a bank and drain every account. Or obtain otherwise well protected trade secrets leading to the tanking of a business. Years in prison for that level of crime is not just understandable, most countries would do the same.

Draining an individual's bank account is bad enough but the CFAA was targeted at the possibility of much larger computer crimes. Much like the copyright laws, however, it was written broadly enough to survive without much adjustment over the years which means, as technology has progressed, it's increasingly outdated as it can (has, is and will continue to) be used as a cudgel against more and more people.

Don't worry. This stooge will get a job on the merit of his previous stupidity. Someone will think it's cool or edgy or innovative to have a disgraced numbskull on the pay roll at least for a little while.

It's a trouble with that particular law. It's very broad and mostly meant to punish people who use computers to steal large amounts or from large numbers of people. Tech-support scammers, for instance, or hackers who steal your credentials some other way and then clean out your bank accounts or charge thousands of dollars of stuff on your credit cards. To make it broadly scoped enough to catch the stuff they wanted to catch, they also left it open to being used for really minor stuff like what was done here.

Best law is a law that makes everyone a criminal. Because then when you need to score political points or just get annoyed by someone it is easy to lawfully get rid of them. After all the indoctrination is that law is equal to ethics (while in reality they have very little in common).

My brother is an attorney. While he was going to law school and just starting his practice, we would have disagreements over the meaning of the law. His view was that law was black and white, fairly created, while I said that the law was grey and created by people in power to keep themselves in power.

5 years later I get a phone call at work out of the blue. It was my brother and the first words I heard were. "You're right."

History is written by the victor and laws are created by the powerful.

It's a trouble with that particular law. It's very broad and mostly meant to punish people who use computers to steal large amounts or from large numbers of people. Tech-support scammers, for instance, or hackers who steal your credentials some other way and then clean out your bank accounts or charge thousands of dollars of stuff on your credit cards. To make it broadly scoped enough to catch the stuff they wanted to catch, they also left it open to being used for really minor stuff like what was done here.

Best law is a law that makes everyone a criminal. Because then when you need to score political points or just get annoyed by someone it is easy to lawfully get rid of them. After all the indoctrination is that law is equal to ethics (while in reality they have very little in common).

My brother is an attorney. While he was going to law school and just starting his practice, we would have disagreements over the meaning of the law. His view was that law was black and white, fairly created, while I said that the law was grey and created by people in power to keep themselves in power.

5 years later I get a phone call at work out of the blue. It was my brother and the first words I heard were. "You're right."

History is written by the victor and laws are created by the powerful.

What's the solution? A nation without laws? Or do we just "re-do" civilization and re-build humanity from the ground up, because this is how every society has ever worked since...ever.

Your closing statement is a cute meme, but a trite and useless observation.

Between what he did and the fact that he still refuses to take responsibility for his actions, there is exactly zero chance he ever gets a job with a reputable media outlet. Nor should he.

Or he actually didn't do it. In which case, why would he take responsibility for it?

I don't know if he's guilty or not. But the justice system gets it wrong quite a lot. (The Innocence Project is a thing for a reason.) So I wouldn't be surprised if he actually wasn't guilty. Our system prioritizes efficiency and conviction rates over justice and accuracy.

I don't take a conviction (or lack thereof) as proof of anything. And neither should any skeptical person.

If I remember the Matthew Keys case, the main crux of the defense case was that misappropriation of data (list of info from the CMS server) and misuse of credentials (by giving them to third parties) did not constitute "damages" under the CFAA.

I feel like that's a pretty hard case to make. If someone gave someone else credentials and that second person took a customer list using those credentials, I think you're going to have trouble making that argument that theft and unauthorized access isn't a "damage" defined as "any impairment to the integrity or availability of data, a program, a system, or information" under the CFAA.

In any case, Key's own attorneys kinda sucked. They called no witnesses, and they didn't really present a case of their own, opting merely to respond to the government's case. Either they're dumb and incompetent, or they just didn't have anything with which to put on a case of their own.

He's definitely an asshole but why is it jail for all but the connected? This guy did 40 minutes worth of mischief and now his entire life will be a struggle. I think I've heard both Hilary Clinton and Trump call this a nation of laws. How the hell would they know?

This is a journalist who became the story, not because he was protecting a source.

He should never be taken seriously again, unless he asks the question, “Do you want fries with that?”

Even if he did do it, I think the American obsession with punishing people for their whole lives is really bad for society. Undoubtedly you've done some illegal things. Should you be reduced to fast food worker? I don't think so.

Why do you think their prisons are so full? Because minimum wage isn't enough to live off. Social security is non existent and if you were ever convicted, that's about the best you can hope for, vindictive SoBs. But hey 'tough on crime' still gets politicians elected so I'll just sit back and laugh at their third world incarceration rates.

This is a journalist who became the story, not because he was protecting a source.

He should never be taken seriously again, unless he asks the question, “Do you want fries with that?”

Even if he did do it, I think the American obsession with punishing people for their whole lives is really bad for society. Undoubtedly you've done some illegal things. Should you be reduced to fast food worker? I don't think so.

Why do you think their prisons are so full? Because minimum wage isn't enough to live off. Social security is non existent and if you were ever convicted, that's about the best you can hope for, vindictive SoBs. But hey 'tough on crime' still gets politicians elected so I'll just sit back and laugh at their third world incarceration rates.

Great point. Because people with money never commit crimes.

People with a lot of money only end up in prison if they screw over other people with even more money.

Look at Shrekli , he is in prison for economic fraud against the rich, not because his price increase resulted in dead children.

Between what he did and the fact that he still refuses to take responsibility for his actions, there is exactly zero chance he ever gets a job with a reputable media outlet. Nor should he.

Or he actually didn't do it. In which case, why would he take responsibility for it?

I don't know if he's guilty or not. But the justice system gets it wrong quite a lot. (The Innocence Project is a thing for a reason.) So I wouldn't be surprised if he actually wasn't guilty. Our system prioritizes efficiency and conviction rates over justice and accuracy.

I don't take a conviction (or lack thereof) as proof of anything. And neither should any skeptical person.

These projects generally focus on those convicted to seriously long sentences or on death row. These are cases that are generally heavily scrutinized already and they find a staggering rate of wrongful convictions.

4.1 percent of defendants who are sentenced to death in the United States are later shown to be innocent: 1 in 25. It's not much of a stretch to believe false conviction rates are higher for lesser crimes..

Why do you think their prisons are so full? Because minimum wage isn't enough to live off. Social security is non existent and if you were ever convicted, that's about the best you can hope for, vindictive SoBs. But hey 'tough on crime' still gets politicians elected so I'll just sit back and laugh at their third world incarceration rates.

The third world wishes they could afford our incarceration rates. Only one country exceeds us and their population is so small it qualifies as a statistical anomaly.

"caused the Tribune Company to spend thousands of dollars protecting its servers"

I'm not sure how that's a valid basis for the judgement since they should have already have those protections in-place as standard best practices. If they didn't have those protections or process in place to protect their content, then they were themselves negligent.

Between what he did and the fact that he still refuses to take responsibility for his actions, there is exactly zero chance he ever gets a job with a reputable media outlet. Nor should he.

Or he actually didn't do it. In which case, why would he take responsibility for it?

I don't know if he's guilty or not. But the justice system gets it wrong quite a lot. (The Innocence Project is a thing for a reason.) So I wouldn't be surprised if he actually wasn't guilty. Our system prioritizes efficiency and conviction rates over justice and accuracy.

I don't take a conviction (or lack thereof) as proof of anything. And neither should any skeptical person.

For the sake of argugment, let’s say every word of the Sam Snow story is true. Ok, so now you have a journalist protecting a source who, by the way, happens to also be someone he used to date, and gave a key to his apartment and let use his personal PC, which contains the news stations’ CMS credentials. That former lover, also happens to be a member (?) of anonymous. And when the former lover handed over Keys’ keys to anonymous with the instructions to “fuck shit up,” Keys not only doesn’t reveal his source, he doesn’t even acknowledge that he had a source that was protecting who took advantage of him, until after he was convicted. Instead of telling people he was burned by a source/ex-lover, he turns the whole story into a crusade against overreaching cops and journalistic integrety, and the ills of the CFAA.

So, even if the story is true, you’ve got someone with extraordinarily questionable journalistic ethics and judgment. He might be a decent advocate, but I don’t know why a media company would hire him as a journalist.

Between what he did and the fact that he still refuses to take responsibility for his actions, there is exactly zero chance he ever gets a job with a reputable media outlet. Nor should he.

Or he actually didn't do it. In which case, why would he take responsibility for it?

I don't know if he's guilty or not. But the justice system gets it wrong quite a lot. (The Innocence Project is a thing for a reason.) So I wouldn't be surprised if he actually wasn't guilty. Our system prioritizes efficiency and conviction rates over justice and accuracy.

I don't take a conviction (or lack thereof) as proof of anything. And neither should any skeptical person.

Well, to be clear, he either did it or shared his credentials with someone who did it...

Why do you think their prisons are so full? Because minimum wage isn't enough to live off. Social security is non existent and if you were ever convicted, that's about the best you can hope for, vindictive SoBs. But hey 'tough on crime' still gets politicians elected so I'll just sit back and laugh at their third world incarceration rates.

The third world wishes they could afford our incarceration rates. Only one country exceeds us and their population is so small it qualifies as a statistical anomaly.

Why do you think their prisons are so full? Because minimum wage isn't enough to live off. Social security is non existent and if you were ever convicted, that's about the best you can hope for, vindictive SoBs. But hey 'tough on crime' still gets politicians elected so I'll just sit back and laugh at their third world incarceration rates.

The third world wishes they could afford our incarceration rates. Only one country exceeds us and their population is so small it qualifies as a statistical anomaly.

Seychelles?

Hey, I know a girl that sells sea shells on the sea shore there! What a coincidence!